Thursday, 11 April 2013

There is a paper being reviewed in Parliament which may have an impact on anyone who publishes on-line in the UK. The regulations are currently in draft form and may be due to amendment before being put on the statute books.

The Legal
Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013 should clarify the requirements of non-printed deposits within the UK. This legislation is expected to have an impact on publications
made via websites and downloads. At present, it looks as if such publications will require an ISBN number, but it is unclear if this applies to all such publications or to future publications.

The Pterosaur Database is reviewing some of its pages in case there is a legal requirement to record and declare downloads to a central repository. The current legal repositories are:

British Library (“BL”)

Bodleian Library, Oxford (“Bodleian”)

University Library, Cambridge (“CUL”)

Library of Trinity College, Dublin (“TCD”)

National Library of Wales (“NLW”)

National Library of Scotland (“NLS”)

The new legislation will, in its present form, permit harvesting of documents from the Internet to the repositories for archiving and for public access at the repositories. There is an issue that sales of texts and DVD/ music downloads need protecting, but this is not finalised at this point.

The Pterosaur Database has undergone a global update in the last 2 weeks to ensure that the bulk of its content is current. many thanks to the work of Hike Hanson for his species list, which has formed a key part of the update. Also thanks to Lorna Steel for her listing of the NHM London specimens which has allowed me to update this important collection. There are some issues over consensus in some of the updates, but the classification of pterosaurs has always been in a state of flux, so the data needs to be viewed as a guide rather than a final version.